Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair in Texas, Kashiana Singh in Chicago, and (Nelson) Howard Miller in Georgia. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Today we’re going to take a look at a short, tightly-written, and beautifully interwoven poem by American Poet Pat Mora, who was born in El Paso, Texas, and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, both places in which the desert is never far away. The desert is an important presence in today’s poem, Curandera (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57665/curandera). In fact, you might consider it as much a character as the Curandera herself.

The title is a Spanish word whose equivalent in English would be Medicine Woman. The opening stanza gives us identity:

They think she lives alone

on the edge of town in a two-room house

where she moved when her husband died

at thirty-five of a gunshot wound

in the bed of another woman. The curandera

and house have aged together to the rhythm

of the desert.

The husband’s killer is not identified. The first line also adds ambiguity. But the important line is the last one, that cements the structure of this tight porm - that the Curandera and her home are one with the desert. That rhythm concept runs throughout. Perhaps, to be a Curandera, she must be married to the desert, and to no one else. Note that Mora emphasizes the idea of rhythm in her word choices and word order - repeated vowel sounds (assonance) and consonants (consonance).

She wakes early, lights candles before

her sacred statues, brews tea of yerbabuena.

She moves down her porch steps, rubs

cool morning sand into her hands, into her arms.

Like a large black bird, she feeds on

the desert, gathering herbs for her basket.

The second stanza reinforces the idea that she is immersed in the desert - she rubs its sands into her skin, she drinks tea made from desert mint, she “feeds on the desert”, “like a large black bird” - Large black birds in the desert are often vultures, scavenging the remains of the dead, adding to her mystical nature and reinforcing the metaphor.

The third stanza continues describing the rhythm of the Curandera’s life, made up of small details, but returns, yet again, to the desert, “always, to the desert.”

By sunset she is tired. The wind

strokes the strands of long gray hair,

the smell of drying plants drifts

into her blood, the sun seeps

into her bones. She dozes

on her back porch. Rocking, rocking.

And now the desert wind, like a spouse or a lover, is stroking her hair, and seeping into her blood and her bones. The consonance here is very strong: sun / set / she / strokes / strands / smell / plants / drifts / bones / she / dozes.  “S” sounds are everywhere, yet the word choices match well. The s-s-s- reinforces the sound of the wind, her sleeping, and perhaps the seeping process, as the medicine woman seems now to have become a part of the desert herself. The “Rocking, Rocking,” of her chair again echoes and reinforces the rhythms throughout the poem.